water everywhere
On Christmas day when I took Leah home I also walked the dogs. It wasn't pouring at that point—just steady drizzle—so I wasn't too uncomfortable. And I didn't have any thought that water would be a problem in any other way. In fact, interested in seeing where a foot of snowmelt plus near-constant rain for over 12 hours was going, I headed for the path along Elm Brook. Which was fine—delightful!—until in the last 100 yards we ran into the obstacle seen in the last image of this post. Refusing to walk all the way back the way I'd come, I found a fallen log across a drainage ditch a little ways back that bore my weight, barely, to let me escape from the trap I'd walked into (Blue jumped the ditch cleanly; Scout had a misstep and fell in, but it didn't matter too much because he was already soaking). It was the most water in Elm Brook in years! And it wasn't the only place where we found high water this week.
good thing it no longer houses any boats
On Sunday, I took the dogs for a long walk around Fairhaven Hill. I went the opposite way than we usually go and I came down towards the river on the second half of the walk, and when I reached the boathouse—looking forward to seeing it with enough water to be usable, at last—I found that the river's rise had overshot and the whole dock was underwater. Oh well. The low path by the river was also impassible, and further along the woods looked entirely different with the water coming up dozens of yards higher and bringing the river to places that, just a couple weeks ago, felt entirely removed from it. Then in today's walk the October Farm Riverfront was even more dramatically different: a big chunk of the main path along the river was entirely under water. So was even more of the opposite shore, to the point that the boys were having trouble believing that it could ever have been as close as those trees coming up out of what looked like an endless sheet of water. If we were getting bored of visiting the same places over and over again, all this water certainly makes them interesting again!